14 DAY TRIAL // Since tablets are going to come out by the dozen at CES, it is not surprising that their makers would try to stand out in some way, and ASUS figured it would use a physical means of input as its trump card.
The few media tablets already available have sold successfully enough that many PC and consumer electronics makers decided to push their own products.
Thus, it is not surprising to hear that ASUS is getting ready to launch multiple ones of its own, under the Eee Pad brand.
What might, on the other hand, allow it to stand out from most of the rest is the so-called Eee Pad Transformer.
Basically, it is a product that seeks to grant its owners the possibility of circumventing the drawback most often invoked when speaking of slates, namely the lack of a physical keyboard.
The Transformer is, essentially, a slate to which can be added a specially-designed dock consisting of a QWERTY keyboard, a touchpad and built-in battery.
As for the tablet itself, it is a 10-inch model with a capacitive touchscreen whose native resolution is of 1,280 x 800 pixels.
The center piece is the NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC (system-on-chip), paired with either 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM (random access memory).
Additionally, there can be 16 GB, 32 GB or 64 GB of built-in flash storage, expandable by significantly more via the available SD card slot.
Furthermore, ASUS's tablet boasts two cameras, a 5 megapixel on at the rear and a 1.2 megapixel model on the front.
Other specifications include Bluetooth 2.1, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, a mini HDMI output and the Android Honeycomb (3.0) operating system.
April is the time of arrival for this particular slate, when it will sell for $399 to $699, depending on the memory and storage options.